In Memory of Purple Prose

I'm quite aware that my newsletter has become rather formulaic.

Words have meanings. Meanings evolve. What was once praised is now ridiculed. (Or vice versa.) There is no objective meaning for color, it is whatever we deem it to be. We are probably wrong. Color is not only pigments and hues. Questions. Etymologies. Ancient languages. Medieval texts. Modern languages. Research. Rabbit-holes. Facts. Inconvenient facts. The roller coaster of agony and ecstasy. Wild theories. Conflated ideas? Persecution. Colonization. Religion. Fruits. Vegetables. Birds. Libraries. Random connection. Borrowed words. Misunderstood words. Intersection of cultures. Obscure reference. Art. Science. Literature. Popular culture. More questions. Tradition! Meaning! Words! Color! Curiosity! Delight!

A wandering definition

Purple prose is described as "Extravagant or flowery writing".

"Extravagant" comes from the Latin extra (“beyond”) + vagor (“to wander, stray”).

What I wanted to write

I had intended to show how purple prose, has gone from being praised by the likes of George Orwell and Paul West, to being mocked, misunderstood, and misused. I wanted to wax poetic about the essays of Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, and lament the death of the long-form advertisement and journalism.

Then I spent way too much time reading the writings of George Orwell, Paul West, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf, and I completely forgot the point I was trying to make.

What I did write

Purple prose, as an art form, was lucky enough to receive a proper obituary by the writer Paul West on the front page of the New York Times Book Review section in 1985, when people still read newspapers. Though, I'm not quite sure if everyone understood it to be an obituary at the time.

Of course, purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it by showing - showing off - the expansive power of the mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees, dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a word, a daub, a sonata. The impulse here is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy.
– "In Defense of Purple Prose", Paul West, 1985

When trying to write this particular newsletter, I had one slight problem. I was unable to explain what purple prose used to be. One could say that West's description was beautiful, but wholly unhelpful.

Purple relishes that sort of thing, zeroing in on it or concocting it as part of the thing it loves to make: a paste as thick as life itself, a stream of phenomena delighted in for their own sake. And it is not a matter of inventing something out of nothing, for that cannot be done; everything is derivative, so there is no getting away from what might be thought the bases of life, of art. The farfetched always takes you home again, never mind how strained its combinations, how almost unthinkable its novelties. The color we have never seen, the smell we have never smelled, the mind we have never known, can only be made from the colors, the smells, the minds, we already know.
– "In Defense of Purple Prose", Paul West, 1985

Inability to describe a feeling

I don't know how I think.

I have both aphantasia and anendophasia. It means I don't see mental images or have an inner monologue. Until I discovered a few years ago that most other people, in fact, see pictures in their heads and hear voices, I thought I was normal. I assumed that everyone else experienced the world the same way I did. I did not know that when many people read highly descriptive works of fiction, they actually visualize the scene in their minds.

When people speak of synesthesia, it is described as visualizing specific colors associated with either sounds or numbers. I can't even imagine what it would be to experience this.

In the same vein, I cannot describe the utter delight I feel when I read purple prose.

Some words about writing

Instead, I attempted to find examples of purple prose from writers from the previous millenium.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
– "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell, 1946

Now, this power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. Everyone who has ever written a sentence must be conscious or half-conscious of it. Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations—naturally. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.
– "Craftsmanship", Virginia Woolf, 1937

I felt like Ecclesiastes, realizing the meaningless of the task.

I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.
– "Why I write", George Orwell, 1946

As he talks, West punctuates his thoughts, his left index finger gesturing, almost conducting music, and then returning to rest, pensively, at his lips. "I hear the words pronouncing themselves as I pick out and use them. It's rhythmical, too – as I'm writing a page, I can hear the rhythms of the sentences that I haven't yet written lining up. All I have to do is put the words into them."
– "A Stylist's Delight: A Conversation with Paul West", Barbara Adams, 1996

It's all completely useless. Even Ms. Adam's description of West's style lacked a precise description.

West's habit of lush, erudite wordplay is at times so baroque that one almost wants to call it febrile, were it not so sensuously grounded. Some sentences spin out for more than 230 words and a dozen ideas, and on such voyages you either trust the captain and enjoy his company, or you don't.
– "A Stylist's Delight: A Conversation with Paul West", Barbara Adams, 1996

I won't waste your time showing examples of writers, editors, and letter-writers using the term "purple prose" in the negative sense. Life is too short to waste time reading such things. If the definition of purple prose has shifted to mean "superfluously florid language", which is the derogatory sense in which it is used today, then we now have an orphan style of prose, and no one, it seems, cares enough to mourn its loss of identity.

Instead, I'd rather share a random paragraph which mentions "the purple dignity of tragedy" from Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist".

For when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.
– "The Critic as Artist", Oscar Wilde, 1891

OBM

Purple prose was a style of prose composed by a writer to delight both themselves and their readers. It represented play and whimsy, unquantifiable by an algorithm, only to be read and appreciated by a human.

Scholars estimate that the art form had survived more than 2000 years, since Horace wrote Ars Poetica in 19 BC, and survived both the Catholic Church and the Puritans, but as it required both a human writer and a reader, it could not survive the era of Generative AI.